I Need a New Moses

Well, good morning, Summit Church. I have not had a chance yet to personally celebrate with you all the things we saw God do over Easter weekend here. We had right at our different campuses around the triangle, right at about 13,000 people. And we had over 100 professions of faith that weekend. And last weekend, 82 of those people were baptized. And we believe that a bunch more are going to join that number today.

Why don't we put our hands together and celebrate what we saw God do? Maybe even more exciting is the Summit Church or the churches that we have planted in the United States over the last few years. We sent out about 250 or so of our people to plant these churches around the U.S. and different cities.

They had a combined attendance of 10,000 people, which is up 44% from the previous year. Maybe best of all, 162 churches that we planted internationally celebrated Easter with us, some of them for the very first time. These are churches that did not exist until by God's grace and in the power of the Holy Spirit, you planted them.

Many of them in unreached people groups and Muslim people groups around the world where previously there had been little to no gospel witness at all. I hope it is amazing and I hope we never take for granted how God is multiplying this church around the world. Amen. Amen. Put your hands together one more time.

And thank God for these things. As I mentioned at the end of this message, I'm gonna give many of you a chance to be baptized this weekend. I'll actually give all of you the chance to be baptized this weekend, but many of you will take me up on it right here on the spot. If you never have before, we have all the stuff that is required for it. We are ready for you. Even if you did not come this morning ready for it, I will give you more instructions at the end of the service, but I just wanted to give you a heads up on that. If you have a Bible, I'd like for you to take it out now and open it to Deuteronomy 18, or turn it on and scroll to Deuteronomy 18.

If you are seated, you don't have a Bible, but maybe you're sitting around somebody that looks like they have one. If they look friendly, just say, hey, can I look on with you so that you can follow along with us. As you're turning there, have you ever had the experience of meeting some kind of celebrity? And when you met them in person, you were surprised at how small they were compared to what they seemed like on screen. Tom Cruise was kind of famous for being like that. The first image I have of Tom Cruise is of course from Top Gun, where he just looks larger than life. He looks like he's about six foot five. They say, you know, in reality, this is more what he is actually like.

He's pretty small fellow. I am no celebrity obviously, but sometimes when I meet people at other campuses who have only seen me before on a screen, they will say, oh, I've never met you in person. You're so, and I can tell they're thinking disappointing, disappoint, I know that's what they're thinking. And then there are people who just don't recognize me at all at other campuses. I visited one of our campuses not long ago and a very friendly lady, I think she was on the first impressions team. She came up and said, are you new here? And I said, well, sorta. She looked down at my wedding ring and she said, she goes, you know, if you have kids, we have the most awesome kids ministries here.

And I said, I've heard that before. At one of our campuses, these two teenage girls came up to me and they said, will you take a picture? And I thought, this is so sweet. These two high school girls wanna get a picture of their pastor or they can put on their Facebook wall and talk about how meaningful my messages are to them. And so I said, oh, I would be honored to. And I kid you not, she hands me her camera and says, just get the two of us over here by this summit logo, if you wouldn't mind.

I said, all right, I'll be happy to do that. For Jewish people, Moses was more than a celebrity. Moses was larger than life, but he was not just a celebrity. He was the deliverer. He was their national founding father. He was their law giver. In many ways, he was the architect of their faith. He was George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. all wrapped up into one. He was revered in life and even more so after death. When he died, God had to hide his bones so that the Israelites did not dig them up and worship them. So there is no doubt that Moses really shocked them, surprised them in Deuteronomy 18, 15, when he said in his final sermon to them, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers.

It is to him that you'll actually listen. You see Moses ends his life in his final sermon, pointing to a new prophet, a better prophet he is saying, who would do for the Israelite people what Moses had been unable to accomplish himself. Moses, you see in many ways had been a failure. He had given the law to the Israelites faithfully, but he had been unable to get the people to actually obey the law. The history of Exodus through Deuteronomy, if you've been reading along with us, you've just gotten through Deuteronomy, it reads like one long continuous list of failures. In Exodus 32, right after God gave the law, the cement was still wet on the tablets.

Moses got delayed on the mountain, so the people panic and they take off their jewelry and they melt it down to make a replacement God, which they start to dance around and jump over the fires and do all these pagan sex acts. The scene looked like what Franklin Street would have looked like on Monday night, had things gone slightly differently. By the way, I did everything I could, Chapel Hill Campus.

I put a ram on the stage. I mean, that's just nothing more than I felt like I could have done. But the people failed. They broke the law no sooner than it had been given. Then there was the incident at a place called Massah where they were running short on water. And so they said, God, you forsaken us. And they hatch a plot to kill Moses and go back to Egypt. Keep in mind, this is after they've seen God split the Red Sea for them and provide manna every morning from heaven. But they're like, yeah, yeah, God, we know that you just ended four centuries of slavery. You miraculously split an ocean in half. And every morning you drop 500 metric tons of bread out of the sky to feed us.

But what have you done for us lately? They were fearful and unbelieving. Last week, Pastor Jason showed us how the people doubted God when he told them that he would drive the giants out of the land, even though he proved that he could do it. Moses had been able to deliver Israel from their slavery in Egypt, but not from their slavery to idolatry and unbelief. The giants of Canaan were not nearly as fearsome as the giants of sin and fear in their hearts. Furthermore, Moses had been unable really to bridge the gap between them and God.

Even with all the complex system of sacrifices, a gigantic curtain remained between the people and God that they could not go behind lest they be struck dead. So Moses says, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, another one from your brothers. It is to him you shall listen, just as you desire the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, oh, let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire anymore, lest I die. The Lord said to me, they're writing what they've spoken. They can't see me, they can't hear my voice because they're so sinful I would kill them. I will raise up therefore for them a prophet like you, another one from among their brothers. You see the people had a problem. Even with Moses and a perfectly given law, the people could not stand in the presence of God because they had sinful hearts.

And what God had always wanted, what he had created us for was for us to be in his presence, for us to be closer to him than we were to anybody else on earth, to be his cherished sons and daughters, to be his friends. Furthermore, Moses turns out to be a deeply flawed leader himself. Moses had himself been sinful and unbelieving. In Numbers 20, the Israelites are in another one of their complaining fits, again, about where they're gonna find water. So God tells Moses, go out and speak to the rock in the presence of the people and I'll make water flow out of the rock for them. But Moses is ticked off. So he walks out there and he says, you fools, you hard-hearted heathens. And instead of speaking to the rock, like God had said, he hits it twice with his staff instead. You say, well, what's the difference?

It communicates something different. Every parent knows that if one of your kids comes down and says, hey, my brother won't give me my ball back. And you say, well, go back up to him and tell him that I said to give it back.

And your kid goes up and says, hey, this is for mom and punches him in the mouth. That's not the same thing. God said that it was more than just frustration and impatience on Moses' part. It was unbelief and it was a failure of love. Moses had failed them as a leader. You see, Moses' love had its limits. So Moses said, I'm not the final prophet that you need. There's another one coming and he is much greater than me.

As big as I've been to you, I've not been big enough. This coming prophet will do what I've never been able to do. I could explain the law accurately to you, but I have not been able to lead you to obey it. So let me stop before we go any farther and tell you why that is so important for us. You see, just like with Israel, number one, we need a law that can change us. For most of us, the problem is not that we don't want to be different, or excuse me, the problem is not that we don't know that we should be different. Our problem is that we can't make ourselves be different. We know, you may not believe in the 10 commandments, but we all have a law that we kind of ascribe to. We know we should be more honest, more moral, more diligent, more loving, more courageous. We need to be better students or better dads. The problem is not that we don't know these things.

The problem is we can't convince our hearts to act that way all the time. The law is like railroad tracks. Railroad tracks can lay out for you exactly where you're supposed to go, but say you've got several tons of coal that you're trying to move along those tracks.

The tracks, even perfectly laid out, are not able to move the coal down the tracks. The law gives us the way to go. It doesn't give us the power to get there. It's what Martin Luther called the dilemma of the great commandment. The great commandment is that the way Jesus said, you sum up all the commandments, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Luther said the dilemma of that commandment is that if you don't love something, then you can't be commanded to love it, right? I mean, remember when you were dating, if your parents commanded you to love somebody that you didn't love, no command of theirs is gonna put love in your heart for them. The flip side of that is if you do love something, then you don't need to be commanded to love it. I've told you before, you never have to command me to eat a steak or take a nap or hug my kids or kiss my wife.

I love those things. I do them naturally, and Luther said that's the dilemma. The dilemma is if you don't love God, you can't be commanded to love Him, and if you do love Him, you don't need to be commanded to. So what Luther said is what the law requires is freedom from the law. The law has an inherent contradiction in it. This law requires freedom from the law. Does that make sense?

Maybe this will make it make sense. I haven't told this story in a while. I have told it before, but it's been at least 18 months, and that's my statute of limitations on stories, and then I can tell stories again. When I was in high school, I dated and started to date a girl, and she was great, awesome, but I hadn't dated her enough. I didn't really know what her status of our relationship was, and I was too cowardly to actually have the conversation, so when it came time for me to go to college, she was still a senior in high school, so I just left. I thought that's the easiest way to do this. I just left.

I went to school up in upper state New York. Now, we wrote a few times. It was friendly, and we agreed to get together. I was home for Christmas break, so December 22nd was the day that we were supposed to meet, and she lived about an hour away from me, and so the morning of December 22nd, I had this horrible thought. I thought I'm going to see her three days before Christmas. I'm not sure the status of our relationship. Am I supposed to get her a Christmas present? Because if she gets me a Christmas present, and I don't get her one, then I look like a total dirtbag, but I don't want to drop 70 bucks on some girl I've got no future with.

You can understand my dilemma, right? And so I'm driving on the way to her house, and I run into the mall. I go into a sporting goods shop, and there I see it.

I see the resolution to my dilemma. It was an Adidas neck warmer. It said Adidas in real big letters. You wore it when you were skiing. It cost $7. I thought that is perfect because if she gives me a gift, I'll give this to her, and if she doesn't give me a gift, I've always wanted one of those.

That puppy's going to be mine. So I bought it. I took it down to Nordstrom's downstairs, and I asked them to wrap it. They said, did you buy it here?

I said, sure. And so they wrapped it up, and I put it in the back of my car, beautifully wrapped, in the back of my car underneath the seat. I drive out the rest of the way to see her, and I knock on the door.

She opens the door, big old smile on her face. Second thing out of her mouth after, hi, how are you, is I got you a Christmas present. And I'm thinking, you genius. I got you a Christmas present too. So she runs quickly, grabs under the tree, grabs this big, beautiful box with my name on it, and I open this thing up, and I'm telling you, I'm not a clothing connoisseur, as you guys can pretty easily tell, but I picked up this jacket that I could tell costs about like more than $100 is what it looked like to me.

And I literally panicked. I was like, I've got a $7 neck warmer in my car for this girl. And she says, well, you said you had a gift for me. I was like, I left your gift at home. I'm thinking, it's an hour away.

I got days to be able to rectify this. She says, she says, well, she says, you know, my parents aren't here tonight, so we can't hang out here. I haven't seen your parents in a while. Why don't we drive back to your house?

And then you can just give me the gift there. And I thought the judgment of God. And so we drove an hour back to my house. I go in the house and I was like, I want you to wait here in the living room for a minute.

And I went back in there and I found my mom and I'm my mom. Do you have anything that you were going to give my sister, Christy, who goes to the North Raleigh campus? Do you have anything you were going to give to her that she didn't know about yet? And my mom said, why?

I said, don't ask any questions, please. So we go under the Christmas tree and we take out a present that has my sister's name on it. We take her name off of it. We put this girl's name on it and I hand it to her and I say, here's your gift.

I don't even know what it is. She starts opening the presents. She's like, oh, what is it? And I was like, ah, just open it. And so I'm as curious as she is. And she pulls out this sweater and it's like sweater vests and it's beautiful and it looks like an equivalent gift.

And I was like, I live to see another day. Now here's the question, I tell the story. If that girl, to my knowledge, she still, I didn't marry her, that's not Veronica. But to my knowledge, that girl still does have no knowledge of how that gift went down. If she had the knowledge at the time, do you think she would have been flattered to receive that gift? No, she would be insulted because she knows I'm not giving it to her because I care about her.

I'm giving it to her because I don't want to look bad. Why do you think that God wants people to obey him because they feel like they have to in order to get something from him or because obedience to him is gonna keep them from something that they don't want like cursing or hell. God doesn't want people who obey him because they have to. He wants people who obey him because they want to. He wants people who seek after him because there's nothing in life they'd rather seek after more than him. Who do righteousness, not because somebody is waving a stick at him saying, if you don't do this, I'm gonna throw you into hell.

But because they love righteousness more than they love sin. And the law is able to tell us we should be like that but the law is unable to actually put that desire in us. So number one, the law can't change us.

We need a law that can change. Number two, because our greatest enemies like Israel are within us, not outside of us. You see, just like with the Israelites, we think the problem is out there.

It's the giants of disease or debt or divorce or it's the Pharaoh of a bad boss or a bad marriage or low self-esteem. And we're like, God, we need deliverance. We need another Moses. We may not say that literally, but we need some kind of change in situation. We need a political or economic deliverer to come and save it. We need somebody who can bring hope and change or somebody who can make America great again. Or we need somebody who will find a cure for cancer or I need a new house or I need a new spouse or I need a new job or I need new kids or whatever you wanna put in it. Somebody to make us all prosperous.

That's what I need. That's what the people were still looking for when Jesus came. When Jesus came in John chapter one, they started to see the miracles that he was doing. They're like, hey, are you the new Moses? Are you the one that's gonna come and get rid of the Roman oppression and get rid of all the debt and the disease, give us that better life that Moses has always been talking about? They still did not understand this lesson that Moses was trying to teach them. Your greatest enemies are inside of you, not outside of you. That's the deliverance you need first.

Let me give you a little nerd moment here for a minute for you handful of nerds in the room. In the early 20th century, there was a group of socialists in America and Great Britain who believed that man's problem was oppressive government structures. Man's problem was poverty or lack of education. Socialism taught that man was basically good, that his environment had just messed him up. Well, after World War II and all the atrocities of World War II, a bunch of them totally and radically changed their outlook. One of them, the British philosopher David Cecil said, and he kind of captured the thought, the philosophy of progress, the philosophy of the enlightenment had led us to believe that the savage and the primitive was behind us. It turns out that it was actually still within us.

All he did was discover what Moses illustrated 3000 years before. There is no law, no liberation, no external or circumstantial change that can transform the heart of man. You need something different. You need something more powerful, something that even a perfect law cannot supply to you. Number three, we need somebody who will love us unconditionally. In order for real love for God to grow in us, we need a leader who will show us perfect and unconditional love. All of our life, we've craved that unconditional love.

We look for it first in our parents, then we look for it in a spouse. And until we find it, our hearts are fearful and distressed. Told you a couple of weeks ago about Martin Luther, the Catholic monk who rediscovered this idea that God's love is a gift that he gives us unconditionally when we receive it in Christ. The church of Luther's day was like, Luther, if you remove the threat of punishment, then people will lose all their will to obey. If they're not afraid that God will punish them and put them in hell, if they disobey, then what motivation will they have to obey? Luther said, it's actually the exact opposite. Being afraid of judgment will produce a surface level adherence to God's laws.

But underneath that thin veneer of obedience is gonna rush this river of fear and pride and self-interest. You parents see this, right? If I beat my kids mercilessly every time they disobey, I might curb their behavior, at least around me, but underneath that conformed behavior, they're gonna grow up with hate and fear and rebellion in their hearts. It is only in the context of unconditional love that they will learn to love me and trust me and grow up to be healthy, mature, loving adults.

So yes, I discipline them, but I make clear as I do that nothing they can do will ever change my love for them. That's what we need in a deliverer because that's the only way that true righteousness will ever grow in our hearts. That's where the desire for righteousness grows from. True virtue grows only in the soil of security. It is only in the security of God's love for me that love for God grows in me. Here's number four. We need somebody who can actually bridge the gap between God and us.

We need somebody who can bridge that gap. Moses' law was effective at showing us how sinful we were. It was effective at showing us how terrible our sin was, but it couldn't change us. Last week, my wife and I were on a trip with our daughter who just turned 13. We're on a little special trip, so we stayed at this cheap little hotel. My wife, when we walked into the hotel room, says what she always says when we go into a hotel room, "'Don't touch the bedspread.'"

Why? Because she's seen that Oprah special where they take the blue light in and you see all the filth and contaminant and the bodily fluids. It's disgusting, right? The law is like that blue light.

It can reveal the filth of our hearts by showing us how warped and deformed the desires of our heart are, but it cannot change our hearts. If you wanna clean the hotel room, you don't use the blue light. You gotta take Lysol. You can Lysol the room or you can take off the bedspreads or, in my case, you can just ignore it and be happy in life, okay? But the question is, how do you cleanse your heart?

How do you cleanse the filth of your heart? So what Moses promises is extremely relevant to us as well. The Lord your God will raise up our prophet, he says, like me, from among your brothers. Another one is to him, you'll actually listen. There's a couple of important characteristics that he gives us in that one verse right there about this coming prophet.

At first, he says, it's gonna be from among your brothers. Muslims always try to say that Muhammad is this prophet that Jesus was talking about, that Muhammad is the prophet who will come and give the better law, but Muhammad was not a Jew. And Jesus, I mean, God clearly says that this other prophet's gonna be from among your brothers, from among the Jewish people, so it couldn't be Muhammad. The other characteristic is he says, it's gonna be like me.

Like me, consider this. Like Moses, Jesus was a Jew. Like Moses, Jesus was born during a time when Israel was oppressed. Like Moses, when Jesus was born, a local leader tried to kill all the Hebrew boys. In Moses' case, it was Pharaoh.

In Jesus' case, it was Herod. Like Moses, Jesus chose to leave his royal family to identify with his people. Like Moses, Jesus spent time in the wilderness before his ministry began. For Moses, it was 40 years.

For Jesus, it was 40 days. Like Moses, Jesus delivered his people from great danger. When Israel stood between a gigantic body of water and an angry Egyptian army behind them that threatened to destroy them, Moses stretched out his hands and made a safe passage through the Red Sea.

When we were pinned between the sea of our sin and the wrath of God that was coming to destroy us, Jesus stretched out his hands and made a safe passage through the waters of God's judgment. Like Moses, Jesus gave a law. Except Moses gave his law from Mount Sinai with the warning, if you do this consistently, you'll live, but if you disobey it, you'll die. Jesus' law, by contrast, was given from a mountain.

It was called the Sermon on the Mount. But he told his people, you can never keep this law, so I'll keep it for you, and then I'll suffer the penalty for you breaking it, and then I'll give you the power to keep it by keeping it in you. Moses told them to sacrifice a lamb at Passover and put the blood on the doorposts of their home so that the death angel would pass over their home. Jesus sacrificed himself and put his blood on the doorposts of our heart so that the wrath of God would pass over us. Moses had them bring a lamb. Each year is a substitutionary sacrifice to atone for their sin. Jesus gave himself as that substitutionary lamb whose blood, once and for all, satisfied the penalty against our sin. Jesus was the scapegoat sent into the wilderness, bearing our guilt on his head.

He was the bronze serpent lifted up so we could be healed, the rock struck by the anger of God so that we could drink of the water of life, the manna that dropped from heaven so that we could be filled with the bread of life. Everything that Moses gave in shadow, Jesus fulfilled in substance. And unlike Moses, Jesus' blood actually cleanses us so that we can be safe again in God's presence. Moses left the curtain in place. Jesus tore it in two. Every religion leaves the curtain in place. No religion has yet figured out how to tear the curtain between us and God. I used to live as a missionary among Muslims and I was sitting one afternoon with a group of students trying to explain to them why Jesus had to die and them telling me why he didn't have to die. And right as we're in the middle of having this discussion, the call to prayer goes off, the Muslim call to prayer.

Five times a day this happens. They all get up, they go wash, come back. They pray, they sit down. Every time Muslims pray, they go through this vigorous washing process. So when they came back and sat down, I was like, well, tell me why you do all that washing. And they're like, well, we gotta be clean before Allah.

So we clean every part of us and when we go before Allah, we're clean. And I said, okay, what is the filthiest thing that you can touch? Like, oh, pig, pork, bacon. If you touch bacon, you're just defiled. And I'm like, really? Like the filthiest thing in the universe? Yeah. Like if you touch pork, you gotta wash seven times.

Not just one, seven now. You gotta, you know, sand, water, soap. It's this big process. I'm like, so really in all the universe, the filthiest thing is a pig that God created. And they're like, well, one of them says, he says, well, he goes, you know, to be honest, what's probably filthier to God is when we have sin in our hearts and when we love other things more than we love Allah or when we do things that we know are contrary to as well. I'm like, okay, cause we've all done that. I was like, so where does that filth, where does it reside?

And they're like, well, it's in your hearts. I was like, okay, so how do you clean your heart before you, when you go before Allah? And when I say, he said, well, we don't, we just repent and God forgives us.

And I was like, wait a minute. You can't just repent of touching the pig. You have to repent and wash. So why would God have you wash seven times for touching a pig, but the thing that's filthiest to him, there's no cleansing for it at all.

Now they didn't fall to their knees and all get gloriously saved, but it connected with them at that point. Because see Jesus' blood does what no religious observance can do. It's not water that we need to wash the filth of our bodies. It's something that we need to wash the filth off of our souls. And there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins.

Sinners plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stain. Most importantly, unlike Moses, this new prophet never grows weary with us and he never falters in obedience. He lived without sin. There was no guile or deceit that was ever found in his mouth. Jesus did not get mad and strike the rock in frustration like Moses did. In love, he took the stroke of justice so that we could escape it. Jesus is the truer and better Moses.

He's gone that came. He was like Moses, but he was better than Moses. And he gives us what Moses could never gives us, what no law could ever gives us. So see, now that you know that, we can spend our last few minutes here looking at the actual sermon that Moses preached. The whole book of Deuteronomy is one long sermon.

After he's given, after they failed the law, this is his final words to them. And there are two primary themes in this sermon, which you and I can listen to even better than they listen to, because we know the actual prophet that he was talking about. The sermon is kind of summarized in chapter six. So flip over to chapter six.

Let me pick up just a couple of things in there for you. Two themes in this sermon. The first theme is remember. Remember, he's gonna repeat this command some 24 times in Deuteronomy.

At least that's how many we counted. Israel's spiritual wandering is always gonna be marked by a time of spiritual forgetting. It is amnesia that leads to idolatry. Now it's not that they physically could not remember like they had a mental problem.

It's just that these things lost their prominence in their minds. So what does he command them to remember? Verse 12, take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. I'm gonna give you three things you're supposed to remember from that verse.

The first one, letter A, the slavery of sin. Remember the slavery that sin had led you into. You need to stop and remember where your sin had taken you. Some of you can look back at your own life and remember that, can't you? You can remember where you were without God. Can you remember the emotional turmoil, the anxiety that you live with? Do you remember what your life was like? Do you really wanna go back there? Some of you are young. You've been raised in Christian homes and you don't have a life that's been scarred by sin yet.

Thank God. You need to think about where sinful choices can take you because you got a choice right now that you can take a life of freedom and blessing and goodness that leads to eternal life or one of bondage and bitterness and dissatisfaction and strain that leads to hell. And you need to stop and remember where these choices are gonna lead you.

He says, secondly, letter B, you need to remember that you've been delivered. Take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out. Don't just forget that you were in slavery. Also don't forget that God brought you out. You see God's deliverance process, listen to this. God's deliverance process is not just taking you out of bondage. It's taking the spirit of bondage out of you.

And sometimes the last thing is harder than the first thing. Imagine an infant boy taken into the foster care system who is placed into a home where the father abuses him. And the boy spends the first seven or eight years of his life in that home. This dad never tells the boy that he loves him.

He calls him names and demeans him. One day, this daddy comes home drunk and he kicks open the door and he knocks one of the boy's teeth out. This little boy doesn't have a bed. He has to sleep in the corner of a room. He doesn't sleep in pajamas because his dad will barely buy him enough food, much less buy him pajamas.

This little boy never gets toys or games. When he's at school, he has to borrow food from his friends and he shoves it in his pockets so that when he gets home, he's got something to eat. Then one day when he's about seven years old, Child Protective Services takes this child away and he's adopted by a good family with a good father. And this dad starts to speak love and life into the boy. He says things like, son, I'm proud of you or I love you. This boy has never in his life heard those words.

He's never experienced unconditional love. This father cleans him up, buys him new clothes, gives him a bed and toys and lots of things to eat. Well, one night the father walks into the kid's bedroom and the little kid is curled up in the corner sleeping on the floor. So what's the father do? He walks over and he picks him up and says, you don't have to sleep on the floor anymore.

You can sleep in the bed. That was your old family. This is your new one. I'm your daddy now.

You are loved and you are cherished here. Sometimes when the father comes home, the little boy hides in the closet and the daddy says, you don't have to do that anymore either. I'll never hurt you.

I love you. One night at the dinner table, the dad sees the little boy taking food and shoving it into his pockets. And the dad says, you don't have to do that anymore either. I'll never let you go hungry. This is your new family.

I'm your dad. I'll always provide for you. You see, that's the story of every single Christian. Sin has damaged us so that we live in our souls with this sense of fear and under the dread of condemnation. And simply saving us does not take that spirit out of us. But in Christ, God has made you part of a new family.

That means you don't have to live under this cloud of condemnation where you expect to keep suffering for past mistakes. Oh, you're divorced. Oh, you messed up. Oh, you got pregnant. Oh, you got fired. Things are over for you.

Your daddy says, no, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The old has gone, the new has come. We don't have to live with the fear. That we are going to be abandoned and end up in poverty because I know that my God shall supply all your need. He knows every hair that's on your head.

He has them all counted. Not one falls without his knowledge. Of course, he's not gonna let you go hungry. I can lay down every single night with the assurance that surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life and will follow me all the days of my life because I know that he that did not spare his own son for me when I was his enemy isn't gonna abandon me now that I'm his child. You don't have to feel shame because God has chosen you. He has cleansed you and changed you and you are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has appointed for you.

You don't have to compete any longer for the approval of others to prove to yourself or anybody else that you have worth because in Christ, you've got the absolute approval of the only one whose opinion really matters anyway. You're a new person adopted into a new family with a new father. You are a cherished son or daughter who will never be forgotten. Moses says, now live that way. Never forget it because it'll change everything. Let her see. He says, you gotta remember the graciousness of the God who saved you.

See that? Take care lest you forget the Lord himself. Remember the character of this God because it's when you forget this character that obedience becomes drudgery. It's when you forget this God that you lose your joy. It is grasping the trustworthiness of God that enables you to obey with freedom and joy.

In fact, look at this. A few verses later, Moses anticipates a conversation that's gonna take place one day between daddies who saw God do the Red Sea thing and boys, their sons who didn't. Verse 20, when your son asks you in time to come, what is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God has commanded you? Daddy, why do we obey all these rules?

Now, let me tell you what I would say instinctively. I'd say, well, son, the reason God gave us the rule about adultery is because it's better in marriage to have one partner for life. It leads to lifelong intimacy. Marriage sex is the best sex. It keeps us from things like STDs. It keeps us from a lot of heartbreak. God's way is better. And the reason he told us to take one day off a week is because psychologists have proven that you need at least one day a week, that your heart rate slows, that you're not doing the same thing at the normal pace.

It leads to a healthier and happier life. And so ultimately it's better if we take off the Sabbath. That's why God had told us that.

His way is always the best. That's what I would have said. That is not what God said. Notice what God says, next verse. Well, then you shall say to your son, why did we obey?

Let me tell you, when we were slaves in Egypt, the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And then he gave us these statutes to fear him for our good always, that he might preserve us alive as we are this day. In other words, why did we obey, son? Because the God who gave us these rules is a God who saved us. And we know that if he saved us, he's thinking about our good. And so I don't have to sit around and try to figure out if I agree with him, because I know that a God who did not abandon me in slavery is a God that I can trust with my life.

High school student, let me ask you this. If you believe that Jesus Christ died for you, which I know that the majority of you sitting here listening to me do, if you believe that Jesus Christ died for you, do you honestly think that you can't trust him when it comes to things like sex and marriage? How schizophrenic is that? That you would believe that he cared enough to die for you, but you got a better plan that he doesn't know about with marriage and sex and friendship, and you can't really trust him with your life. That is absolute and total insanity.

You see, they only had the Red Sea. We have Mount Calvary. I know that the God who gave me every single rule, the God who beckons me to give him my life is a God that I can trust with my life because he proved it at Calvary. All of our trust in God is founded on what we saw him do for us at the cross. And I saw a movie a couple of weeks ago called Miracles From Heaven. It's a great movie.

Little girl gets deathly sick. Her mother really struggles with faith. Then some amazing things happen, and her the mother, Jennifer Garner, learns to believe again.

Now, it's an amazing movie based on a true story, but the one thing that it leaves out, all these movies leave this out, I guess Hollywood just doesn't have the capacity to communicate this, but the question it never answers is why? Why would I trust God in the middle of pain? Why would I trust God when somebody that I love is hurting? Why would you trust God in the midst of a world like the one that we live in? The answer for the Christian is very simple, because of the cross, because that's where I see the depths of God's love, because I see that regardless of what else is happening in my life, it's not because God has stopped loving me. It's not because God has lost his power, because I know that a God who did not give up on me when I was his enemy is certainly not gonna give up on me now that I am his child. And so the old proverb says it like this, even when I can't trace God's hand, I can trust his heart, because I learn who he is from how he delivered me and I based the rest of my life on what I saw there. You see, as you get older in the faith, the cross needs to grow larger in your life.

It needs to get more dominant in your life to the point that it becomes the filter through which you see everything, because when the cross is large in your life, your obedience will have joy because you'll trust God and you'll be able to persevere through trials and walk confidently because you'll know that the God who didn't abandon you with the cross isn't abandoning you now. So Moses says, remember these things. And if you remember them, then you're going to live joyfully. Command number one is to remember. Command number two is to cling to the word. He says, you gotta cling to this word.

Look at verse six. These words that I command you today, they need to be on your heart. Teach them diligently to your children. Talk to them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way.

In other words, in your family life, around the dinner table, in your work life, think through your work in light of these things. When you lie down, when your eyes are morning and night, bind them as a sign on your hand and they should be as frontlets between your eyes. Your hand will be, let them guard your actions.

The frontlets of your eyes, that's gonna be how you think. You shall write them on the doorpost of your house in your household, on your gates. That's your political thinking needs to be guided by scripture. Cling to this word, he says, because these promises, these promises are everything. Deuteronomy 32, 47, this is not an empty word.

These words are life itself. You see, by a word, God spoke the worlds into existence. By a word, God gives sight to the blind.

He made the lame walk. It's by a word that God raised Jesus from the dead. It's by his word that God brings salvation to the believing heart. It is by a word that he breaks the chains of addiction in your life. It is by a word that he pieces back together the broken shards of your marriage. It is by a word that he renews and transforms your children. This word, Moses said, it is light, it is life. It is salvation. It redeems, reconciles, restores, renews.

It is not an empty word. It's your life. Don't you wanna know it? Don't you wanna know it? Don't you want your kids to know it?

That's why Summit Church, while we're doing the whole story this year, a year where we just walk through the Bible and our messages each weekend, every week in our small groups, we go deeper in it, where we read the Bible through as individuals, some of us for the first time, and where we take our kids through the Bible as well. I'm saying this because some of you have started off strong, but you've kind of fallen off the wagon here. It's time for you to get back in. This is not an idle word. It's not a curiosity. It's your life.

It's the life of your family. And there's some of you that haven't joined up with us yet. Maybe you just started to come to church here. You can jump right in and just spend the rest of this year just going deep into God's word. Let this be the year of the Bible for you.

First things first, I told you this at the beginning of the message. For some of you, you've never taken this step to get into the Christian life. What we're talking about is how you go deeper in the Christian life, how you really become alive. It begins somewhere. And where it begins is something that we call baptism.

Now, let me be very clear. The gospel is that Jesus Christ died for your sin, paid for all your sin, and he offers it as a free gift to all who will receive it. You don't receive it by being baptized. You don't receive it by raising your hand.

You don't receive it by filling out a card or walking an aisle. The way that you receive God's offer of salvation is you believe it with your heart and you just take it as a gift. He offers it to you. He says, whosoever will may come that if you will surrender to him and just say, Jesus, you're the Lord and you'll receive his offer of salvation, he'll save you. After you do that, however, you were supposed to declare that publicly by baptism. Baptism is the public ceremony of salvation. It's where you go public with it. And Jesus said, it is to be the first act of obedience after you trust in Christ. Now, there's a number of you here that have never taken that step of obedience. And over the years, I've been given lots of reasons why. And so, always write them down and then I bring them back up at a time like this, okay?

So here they are. One I get is, I just don't see it as being that important. I mean, what difference is it gonna make?

And it's a little inconvenient and it's kind of humiliating getting wet in front of a bunch of people. And my response to that is always, who are you to tell Jesus which of his commands you think are important and which ones are not? That is not the way to start out your Christian life. It's almost like getting married and telling your wife on your honeymoon night that you're gonna go hang out with the boys. That's not the way to start a marriage. The way that you start surrender to the Lordship of Jesus is not by picking and choosing which commands you're gonna obey and which ones you're not.

So it's important because he said it was important. The second thing that I hear a lot from people, more practical, is they'll say, well, I rode with people. They don't wanna wait for me to get baptized.

Little trade secret here. The reason they invited you this morning was because they were hoping this would happen, okay? So they'll wait. Secondly, if they won't wait, then you could not, Pastor Chuck said this last week, you can call Uber.

In fact, watch this. How many Uber drivers do we have in the audience right now? You are a signed up Uber driver.

Last time we had six. Okay, so I see some around here. That means if after you hit Uber and the person's like, I'm right here, and then you'll just ride home with them and you turn in the receipt and we'll pay for it.

We'll pay for it if you gotta get a ride home, all right? You say, well, people say, well, here's one. They say, well, I was baptized as a baby. I got baptized as a baby. Listen, I wanna be very careful with this one because I know different churches do things in different ways and there are major things and there are minor things.

But every time, listen, hear me out. Every time we see baptism in the Bible, it's always, always, no exceptions, not one exception. It's always a profession of your faith. You do it after you have made a decision to follow Christ. There's not one example anywhere of somebody who is baptized on behalf of somebody else's faith. Acts two, if you believe you can be baptized. Acts eight, if you believe you can be baptized. Acts 16, if you believe you can be baptized.

It's always in that order. When you got baptized as a baby, there was no faith of your own to declare. It was your parents' faith that was being declared. And listen, thank God for your parents' faith, right? They were hoping, the reason they baptized you is they were hoping that when you got older, you would follow Jesus and now you are. So when you get baptized as a profession of your faith, that is not a repudiation of their faith.

It's actually an affirmation of their faith. You are ratifying a decision that they made for you 10, 15, 30, 60 years ago. You're gonna call them up after it's over and say, mom and dad, I got good news. Remember that thing you were hoping for me when you baptized me when I was a baby?

It happened. I'm following Jesus now. And I just ratified what you did when I was a baby.

I just ratified it and said, I agree with what my mom and dad were hoping for me. And I am fulfilling all their dreams for me. It'll be a glorious day.

It'll be a glorious day for you and for them. Sometimes people say things like, and this is less spiritual, but they're like, well, it's just messy and my hair, and it takes me like three hours to get my hair done. And we have hair coverings we do. We got deodorant, we got combs, different kinds of combs. We got clothes.

We're like the US Library of Congress when it comes to baptism needs. Ain't nothing you need that we ain't thought of. Nothing.

So you come and we'll take care of it. Now, people say, well, I don't know. I haven't really said yes or no. And I'm like, you have said yes or no. You have or you haven't, right?

There's no middle ground. No, I haven't said yes, just not yet. Listen to this. Delayed obedience is disobedience. It is disobedience and rebellion for you to put off until tomorrow what God has told you to do today. And for many of you, this is the moment that God is saying it's time for you to go public. It's time for you to quit putting this off. It's time for you to stop disobeying because delayed obedience is disobedience.

And I want you to do what you know I want you to do. We had 80 some people who did this last week. We've already had dozens.

I don't know the exact number of our different services before this one. It's time for you to join. So why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses, bow your heads. Let's do first things first. If you're not sure that you've received Christ or you know that you haven't received Christ then you can do it right now by praying a prayer that sounds like this.

Doing your own words from your heart. Jesus, I know you're the Lord. Jesus, I surrender to you. I receive your gracious offer to save me.

Now, for those of you who'd never been baptized, whether you prayed that prayer with me just now for the first time or whether it happened last week or two weeks ago at Easter or 20 years ago, that you'd never been baptized after making a profession of your faith. I want you to say to God, God, give me the strength in just a minute when JD stands us up. Give me the strength to obey, to step out into the aisle like he's gonna invite me to do. Give me the strength. I'll take the first step. You gotta give me the strength from there. God, I pray for those who are right now, their hearts beating, they know that this is about them.

I pray that you give them the faith to take the first step and then Holy Spirit, you fill them with strength from that point on and you take it from there. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. Everybody look about me. All campuses, this is what's gonna happen. In just a moment, about 45 seconds at all of our campuses, I'm gonna stand as all nine campuses are gonna stand up at one time. And when we do that, I want you in one motion just to sort of slip out to the aisles and you come. And somebody will greet you there and they'll take it from there. If you have any questions, you can ask them. They have some questions they're gonna ask you. If either of you decide like, hey, this is not the best time, then we'll talk about that and we can punt it for a while. But we can at least get the conversation started.

Don't delay. As soon as we stand up, you just move out in the aisle. Now, somebody right now, this is happening. Your heart's beating. You're like, I think he's talking to me. I am talking to you, okay? So the person next to you right now is perceiving that you're like this.

And they're just gonna reach over right now with their elbow and they're just gonna be like that, okay? And that means I'll go with you. You don't have to walk alone. I'll go with you.

If they didn't do that just now and they are heart of heart and rebellious, then I want you to kind of look at them and just be like, all right, because I don't wanna go alone. And you guys come together. Come together and just the person in the aisle, they'll grab you and we'll take it from there, okay?

So don't delay. Everybody at all campuses, let's do this together. As one, let's stand to our feet. Let's stand to our feet. If you need to come, just make your way to the aisle. You come, you come and somebody will take it from there.